Ironic drawing: nets and nodes

I don’t know what this image is. Except that is a scribbled–and by the time you see it, inked and colored–vision. Of, a la Jean Baudrillard, even “god forbid” Heidegger, an almost religious conversion from subject/object dichotomy to a node-on-network thing where personality and society are practically the same in that they are both patterns, their only difference is a matter of scale.

This all freaks me out. So I’m reading this essay in a book about postmodernism and I get distracted but not by anything I sense, let alone perceive, like a neighbor’s flushings or radio, but by nothingness. This is not like an abyss opening, as that would be sensed, but a breaking up, a disintegration, an entropizing of all that makes sense. The logic of the sentence being read–its grammar–goes first, then the meaning of the words … in the nick of time before there is absolutely nothing images appear and I’m saved.

I fear it’s not ADHD that’s happening to me, but schizophrenia. The former is a minor inconvenience where you are easily distracted by things and it is fixed by drugs or worked around. The latter is life–as I know it–threatening. It’s where you are distracted not by something but by nothing. Your mind doesn’t simple go somewhere else for a while; it goes nowhere. The “you” you know disappears.

The images save me. I fall (apart) by distraction, by deconstruction of language which is here just in a text, but more seriously elsewhere, where it is my only connection with others. But I can grab on to images and slow my descent. By declaring myself “artist” and acting like one, I can become a subject among other subjects again.

Whew, that was close. The irony is that the drawing of what’s lost saves.